信息管理与商业智能系学术讲座

时   间：2023年12月05日（周二）13:30-15:00

地   点：史带楼503室

题   目：Does Fake News Create Echo Chambers?

演讲人：Jiding Zhang    Arizona State University

主持人：信息管理与商业智能系 刘子博 青年副研究员

摘   要：

Platforms have come under criticism from regulatory agencies, policymakers, and media scholars for the unfettered spread of fake news online. A key concern is that, as fake news becomes prevalent, individuals may fall into online “echo chambers” that predominantly expose them only to fake news. Using a dataset reporting 30,995 individual households’ online activity, we empirically examine the reach of false news content and whether echo chambers exist. We find that the population is widely exposed to online false news. However, echo chambers are minimal, and the most avid readers of false news content regularly expose themselves to mainstream news sources. Using a natural experiment occurring on a major social media platform, we find that being exposed to false news content causes households to increase their exposure to countervailing mainstream news (by 9.1% in the experiment). Hence, a naive intervention that reduces the supply of false news sources on a platform also reduces the overall consumption of news. Based on a structural model of household decisions whether to diversify their online news sources, we prescribe how platforms should moderate false news content. We find that platforms can further reduce the size of echo chambers (by 12-18%) by focusing their content moderation efforts on the households that are most susceptible to consuming predominantly false news, instead of the households most deeply exposed to false news.

个人简介：

Jiding Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. She is passionate in applying and developing data science tools to solve novel challenges in business. Combining causal inference and machine learning methods, her work provides practical insights and recommendations for FinTech, platform governance, and media in the digital age. Her research has appeared in leading academic journals, and has been recognized with multiple awards.

信息管理与商业智能系

2023-11-27